Swiss pilot Bertrand Piccard restarted the record attempt at about 6:20 a.m. local time on Thursday from Kalaeloa airport, east of Honolulu, bound for Mountain View on San Francisco Bay, California.
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Seen from the control room a screen is pictured detailing the Solar Impulse 2 solar powered plane taking off from Kalaeloa in Monaco for a round-the-world odyssey to promote alternative energy on April 21, 2016. (AP Photo/Marco Garcia) Ground crew pulls the Solar Impulse 2 solar plane on to the runway for a dawn lift off at Kalaeloa Airport, Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Kapolei, Hawaii.
“We want to show that clean technology and renewable energy can achieve the unthinkable”, said Bertrand Piccard, pilot and chairman of the program.
The pilot of a solar plane trying to circumnavigate the globe says he has passed the point of no return after departing Hawaii and is forging forward over the Pacific Ocean toward California.
The fuel-free plane Solar Impulse 2 embarked from Hawaii Thursday to continue its rocky but intrepid journey around the world powered only by the sun. The 118-hour journey shattered the record for longest solar-powered flight in terms of distance and duration, easily surpassing the 1,491-mile, 44-hour record Borschberg set when flying from China to Japan on the prior leg of the trip.
At one point the plane was passed by a Hawaiian Air jet whose passengers caught a glimpse of Solar Impulse 2 before the powerful airliner left the slow-moving aircraft behind.
They project it will take 62 hours for Solar Impulse 2 and pilot Bertrand Piccard to reach Moffett Federal Airfield in Mountain View, Calif. Piccard and pilot André Borschberg alternate legs of the journey around the world.
The crew landed in Hawaii last July but was forced to stay in the islands after the plane’s battery system sustained heat damage on its trip from Japan.
In July 2015, the plane was grounded in Hawaii after completing the most grueling leg of this around the world journey.
He said the plane “represents what we could do on the ground in our communities, in our cities”.
“The drive behind the Solar Impulse mission is to demonstrate how innovation and a pioneering spirit can change the world”, said Thomas Oetterli, CEO of Schindler. The team had to put up with several delays from the start caused mainly by bad weather. The plane originally left Nanjing for Hawaii, but diverted to Japan because of unfavorable weather.
The two trans-Pacific legs are the riskiest part of the plane’s global travels due to the lack of emergency landing sites.
The Solar Impulse plane runs exclusively on energy harnessed from the sun; the energy is stored in batteries on the aircraft.
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Solar Impulse is equipped with 17,000 solar cells that absorb energy during daytime to supply power to a 2,077-pound lithium battery used during the night. After crossing the Atlantic Ocean, the final legs include a stop-over in Southern Europe or North Africa before completing the flight at its final destination in Abu Dhabi.
